OTTAWA – The Canadian Human Rights Commission has agreed to hear a series of complaints made by Canadian children and men who have been arbitrarily detained in Northeast Syria for between 6 and 8 years under conditions the United Nations has called akin to torture.
The crux of the complaints centres on Global Affairs Canada and Public Safety Canada’s use of a Trudeau cabinet-approved 2021 “Government of Canada Policy Framework to Evaluate the Provision of Extraordinary Assistance: Consular Cases in North-Eastern Syria” that determines whether the detainees can even be considered for repatriation, despite their Kurdish jailers having repeatedly called on Canada to come and take its citizens home. Since 2020, 32 Canadian women and children have been repatriated from arbitrary detention in eight separate returns courtesy of private actors, court action, and U.S. military assistance.
According to Ottawa lawyer Nicholas Pope, who launched the complaints, “These cases present clear illustrations of discrimination based on age, sex, and family status. For example, the Framework gives less favourable treatment to Canadian children whose mothers were not born in Canada. Canada has insisted that the remaining detained Canadian children (of three non-Canadian mothers) be forcibly separated from their mothers and become orphans in Canada in order to receive repatriation services. In doing so, the government is making the exercise of the childrens’ equality rights contingent upon forfeiting another fundamental right: the right not to be separated from their parents.”
Currently in Northeast Syria, in addition to the three detained mothers and eight Canadian children (with one non-Canadian minor sibling), there are believed to be 9 Canadian adult male detainees. The men’s complaints centre on the Framework thusfar being employed to offer assistance to Canadian women but not men, as well as refusing to consider repatriation for adults in the same way as for those under the age of 18.
“When my son Jack’s case was before the Federal Court, the government seemed to realize it had no case and immediately agreed on the eve of the decision to repatriate a group of women and children,” says Sally Lane, whose son Jack Letts, one of the complainants, just marked 8 years of arbitrary detention in Northeast Syria. “Yet when the Court ordered Jack and the other men brought home, Canada appealed and had that order dismissed. Then the Supreme Court twice refused to hear the case. If that does not scream discrimination against the male detainees, I don’t know what does.”
Lane has not seen her son, who was the focus of a W5 investigation last November, for over a decade.
“The Two Michaels were arbitrarily detained in China for 1,019 days, and the federal government rightfully made their return a top foreign policy priority,” says Lane. “My son will soon mark 3,000 days of arbitrary detention. But for him, and the other men, the barrier is not in Syria, it’s in Canada, which has invested endless resources in refusing the long-standing request of their Kurdish jailers to come and get them.”
Another mother of one of the Canadian men detained, who asked that her name not be shared, declared: “My son is having his rights as a Canadian stripped away with every day that he’s enduring physical and psychological torture, starvation, and inhumane living conditions. He has no contact with the outside world and has no updates about his family or loved ones. This is cruelty beyond words to me, and as a Canadian he has the right to be heard in a Canadian court instead of being held with no charge in a foreign country. Our government has the responsibility to bring the men home, the same way they did the women and children.”
As the Canadian Human Rights Commission considers the detainees’ complaints, it may benefit from the findings of Federal Court Justice Henry Brown, who in January 2023 ordered the government to begin the three-step process to repatriate the men: write a letter to Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria, issue travel documents, and provide a representative to attend a signing ceremony, after which the US military would handle the rest.
Justice Brown wrote that he felt “compelled to observe the three threshold criteria for eligibility to be considered under the Policy Framework appear drafted to exclude the Canadian men imprisoned,” adding that it would not likely withstand Charter scrutiny. He wrote those comments “in the hope the Policy Framework will be materially revised, or that the Canadian male prisoners be considered for repatriation [as was] the case with the Canadian women and children.”
In addition to the complaint of discrimination, the Framework has also come under fire by repatriation advocates for its denial of basic procedural fairness, failure to provide benchmarks or results of its alleged ongoing assessments, and its assumption of guilt.
“The Framework hinges on a legally non-compliant foundation that improperly balances the risks posed to Canadian citizens enduring an arbitrary detention that it is within Canada’s power to end, and the rationale that unspecified, unsubstantiated, unsourced, uncontestable secret security concerns prevent Canada from ending that arbitrary detention and bringing them home,” says Matthew Behrens of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture, which leads the campaign to repatriate the detainees. “The Framework paints all detainees with a singular, damning brush, and demands that they defend themselves against this labeling without having any access to the alleged evidence that may be in the Government of Canada’s hands.”
Pope hopes that a favourable ruling will declare the Framework inconsistent with Canadian human rights standards and call on the Government of Canada to act quickly to return the detainees. “Every Canadian has the right to be treated equally,” he explains. “This is a rare situation in which the detaining authority holding Canadians abroad is actually pleading with us to end the detention, but it is Ottawa that is selectively refusing to let some Canadians return home.”
A petition in support of repatriation has over 28,500 signatures: https://www.change.org/p/canadians-are-dying-free-jack-letts-19-canadian-kids-women-men-in-syria
For further information, contact Nicholas Pope at npope@hameedlaw.ca or 613-656-6917 and Matthew Behrens at tasc@web.ca or 613-300-9536
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